Anyone growing up in Pittsburgh in the ‘50s and ‘60s remembers the red and blue lights atop the Gulf Building (now called the Gulf Tower). If you wanted to know the weather forecast, you would simply look out your window toward downtown and atop what was for years the tallest building in Pittsburgh, the red or blue lights would tell you what you might expect.

Now San Diego has its own public forecast, thanks to artist Spencer Finch, a Brooklyn-based, widely acclaimed artist who also created “Rome (Pantheon, noon, June 14, 2011)” for the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego’s “Phenomenal” exhibition.

Finch’s “Weather Report” is now atop each of the two towers of the Grande condominium project at Santa Fe Place (1199 and 1205 Pacific Highway).

Taking a cue from the old saying, “Red sky at night, sailors’ delight...,” and triggered by an RSS feed from Yahoo weather, the two “light houses” will glow red when the forecast is clear, and blue when the prospects are not so clear.

“My vision was to create watercolors of the skies that would become a project of light and shadow in the sky at an enormous scale, thereby making the connection between the picture, the idea and the weather forecast,” Finch said in a statement.

The installation, initiated by the Centre City Development Corporation and funded by Bosa Development California, combines two areas in which Finch has long shown an interest — light and weather.

For the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011, Finch created “Lunar,” which uses energy from sun to create a nighttime glow that is the exact color temperature of the moon. Among the works he created for a solo exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Modern Art was “2 hours, 2 minutes, 2 seconds (Wind at Walden Pond, March 12, 2007)” which evokes the breeze blowing across Walden Pond.

Perhaps his best-known work is his 2009 installation on New York’s High Line, “The River That Flows Both Ways,” whose 700 glass panes reflect the water conditions on the Hudson River.

Finch attended the Rhode Island School of Design (which presented an exhibition of his work last year, “Painting Air”), Hamilton College and Japan’s Doshisha University.